BURST
A B.C. woman who converted to Islam and married an Islamic State fighter says her decision to leave Canada to join his fight was a “terrible mistake” that she will regret for the rest of her life.
Kimberly Polman’s admission is contained in a handwritten letter she wrote in 2019 — addressed to “Dear Canadians” — asking the federal government to let her return to Canada. The letter was included in an agreed statement of facts provided to the B.C. Supreme Court when she pleaded guilty to a terrorism charge last month. They were ordered released this week by the judge in the case.
It’s the first time the public has heard from Polman, 53, who was repatriated to Canada in 2022 and charged in 2024 with two terrorism counts — leaving Canada to participate in terrorist activity and participating in the activity of a terrorist group.
She pleaded guilty on Oct. 8 to the first count. The second one was dropped, cancelling her jury trial that was set to begin this month.
Polman, who moved to Squamish upon her return to Canada, will learn her sentence after a two-week hearing scheduled to begin later this month.
Before leaving for Syria, Polman was an unemployed mother of two grown children, living in low-income housing in Vancouver on social assistance, according to the 10-page agreed statement of facts.
Polman, the document said, converted to Islam in 2003. Around 2013, she began reading online about the extremist ideology of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and listed by Canada as a terrorist group.
She was also conversing online with people who held those views and whose goal was the establishment of an Islamic state under Shariah law, it said. That’s how she met the man she married online in 2014, Suhayb Muhammad Anan, a Kenyan of Somali descent. In 2015, she moved to join him in Syria, according to the court document. She planned to work in a hospital where she could deliver babies and help children.
But six months after joining Anan in Syria, he divorced her. She was required to live in an all-female guest house until he got her an apartment three months later, the document said.
Ten months later, she married another member of Islamic State, Safraz Ali, who produced explosives and landmines.
She remained with him until January 2019, when they were captured by forces of the U.S-led coalition fighting ISIS near Baghouz, the group’s last Syrian stronghold, according to the agreed statement of facts.
She was turned over to the Syrian troops and eventually taken to the Al-Roj camp in April 2019, where she remained until her return to Canada in October 2022, it said.
“I made a terrible mistake, which I regret constantly and will for the rest of my life,” she wrote in a handwritten letter neatly printed in ink on lined paper, dated April 3, 2019, from “Camp Roj, Hasakah, Syria.”
“I came to ISIS believing I could help women and children … Immediately I was thrown into a world of intense fear, unable to leave.”
She wrote that she came to see ISIS for “what they truly are, a group of powerful men using a highly manipulative combination of religious texts, social media, cultural differences and an ‘us-versus-them’ message.”
She wrote that she needed to return to Canada because “I’m not safe here. I’ve spoken out against ISIS; I’m a traitor to them, someone who betrayed Islam and must be killed.”
She wrote that she feared being judged by strangers when her story was heard, but said she was an “innocent woman” who “ended up with bad people.”
According to the agreed statement of facts, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service seized Polman’s laptop in Canada in 2015 after her children told authorities there might be evidence on it. (The prosecution, according to the document, later conceded that the seizure of Polman’s computer without a warrant breached her Charter rights).
On the computer, authorities found Skype messages between her and Anan and others showing she was aware ISIS was a listed terrorist group and her husband was an ISIS fighter.
Before leaving Canada, she also searched for information about getting arrested for travelling to Syria, jobs for women in Syria, jihadi brides under house arrest and conditions of the Caliphate political-religious state, the agreed facts said.
She also looked for information on how to surreptitiously enter Syria to join ISIS, how to determine if someone is on the no-fly list, how to emigrate, and how to find cheap flights to Vienna, Turkey and Denmark.
She told her family she was travelling to Vienna to work for a longtime friend, an American lawyer. That friend tried to dissuade her from going to Syria and told her to divorce Anan, according to the agreed facts.
But Polman told her friend that Syria would be her chance to enter nursing and that she planned to take her husband to a “deradicalization camp” in Denmark.
The maximum sentence for terrorism is 10 years in prison.